Nadia Camera Offers Opinion of Your Terrible Photos

If things carry on like this, then soon cameras won’t even need human beings to take a photograph. We’ll be relegated to a means of transport, our soft meat-sacks merely following orders from the machine and pointing it in what ever direction it tells us. The Nadia camera, a device which rates you photos for you, even has a human name, all the better not to scare us.

Instead of an LCD screen to check your pictures, the Nadia judges them for you and assigns a percentage score using the automatic rating engine Acquine. It does this even before you press the shutter, allowing you to compose and recompose, with Nadia offering an electronic opinion every time. When you judge the number to be high enough, you press the shutter and take the snap.

Nadia doesn’t even contain a proper camera. Inside the black box is a Nokia N73 cellphone which talks to a nearby Mac via Bluetooth. The Mac sends the image off to Acquine’s “aesthetics inference engine” on the web and gets back a score, which it then displays on screen. Somewhat ironically, submitting the photo of the Nadia to Acquine gives a score of just 32.5%, while a screenshot of this article in draft scores a wondrous 45.5%.

The project, by Andrew Kupresanin, is clearly just an experiment but as we rely more and more on our cameras to automate the photography process, it’s not hard to see almost completely autonomous cameras in the near future.